Social Networking For Sports Lovers Made Possible Through Sidelines

Social networks have been increasing in popularity in the recent years with many of them targeting a specific group of people who they feel would be interested in their type of service. Sidelines is one such network that targets sports lovers or fans and gives them an opportunity to interact with each other through the sharing of articles, videos ,opinions, and even photos that are related to various sports activities. This revolutionary social network was founded by Arka Ray, Marios Assiotis and Vinay Kuruvila who faced a variety of challenges while setting it up but managed to overcome them and succeed. These three have been an inspiration to foreign investors in the United States who are interested in establishing companies or creating jobs in the country.

Sidelines is an idea based on an already existing network of friends in the real world that sports fans already shares information with on a regular basis. The network of fans may be those who are interested in a particular sports team or player and they follow them religiously while sharing their opinions through social networks and e-mails as well. Therefore, Sidelines brings these sports fans into a world whether they can connect with a broader community through an online platform that has been designed specifically for them. Furthermore, the sports oriented social network is similar to the various networks such as Pinterest, Instagram that are targeted towards particular interests such as fashion and photos among others.

As a marketing strategy, founders of Sidelines decided to offer their services through a website rather than the popular mobile option that is being used by many worldwide. The decision to launch through the website at the initial stages has proved to be beneficial to the management of Sidelines as well as the sports fans on the social network as well. For Sidelines they do not need their application approved by the various application stores that are available on various mobile phones and no updates are needed, thus giving them an opportunity to make changes much faster. However, there are plans underway to launch a mobile application of Sidelines that will be available on most smart phones.

Sidelines, is focused on getting the view on the sports fan rather than the experts or commentators that usually give their opinions on various sports related events around the world. The discussions range from the latest news to the any other information that fans feel they should share, similar to what they would have had in a physical setting. Most times the information shared in various forms sparks off a debate that keeps them engaged while revealing their emotions and passions in regard to their favorite teams as well as players.

Overall, Sidelines is a concept that has made the interaction of sports fans much more enriching irrespective of their different interests. It is bound to join and even surpass the various social networks that target particular groups and give their members an opportunity to enjoy a social community that is vibrant.

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Buuteeq of Ballard Receives 10 Million Boost From Venture Capitalists

The online marketing landscape is bound to change, especially for Buuteeq a company that whose sole purpose is to provide content management and marketing services for hotel websites worldwide. The company has been given an opportunity to expand through the entry of Madrona Venture Group and Concur Technologies into the online marketing world through a ten million funding given to them. These two investor companies are established in their own respective fields and are based in Seattle and Richmond respectively. Furthermore, the total funding for Buuteeq stands at seventeen million which gives it a competitive edge in the field of online marketing for hotels.

Buuteeq which has been existence for a few years is a partnership between Forest Key, Brian Saab and Adam Brownstein who are its founders. The growth of the online marketing company has been phenomenal with a current client base of four thousand and an employee head count of forty five. Most of the profits of Buuteeq are derived from the fee that they charge monthly to their clients so that they are able to access tools to assist them in the creation of websites, SEO based content and an online-based booking engine. The clients that use the system set up by Buuteeq manage a wide range of hotels that customers can choose from, which can be a booking for a room at a Bed &Breakfast or an exclusive suite at a grand hotel in any part of the world.

The funding provided by these two venture capitalists allows Buuteeq to help their clients that are based around the world to market themselves on an online platform to guests either on mobile, social networks and other online platforms as well. To put the funding to good use, Buuteeq plans to expand to other international locations such as Europe and even Asia which will also see an increase in the number of employees as well. The employees of Buuteeq whether current or soon to be hired will have the sole objective of increasing the number of customers that use the system set up by the company. Furthermore, the CEO’s of the two companies that provided the funding are now part of the board of Buuteeq which was part of the investor agreement.

According to one of the founders of Buuteeq, the greatest beneficiaries of the extra funding are their clients who are now able to market themselves more effectively through the use of digital mediums. The system offered by the online marketing company help a variety of hotels that are enlisted under Buuteeq to be able to develop relationships with their guests which result in increased revenue. In addition, Buuteeq is also developing a niche in online advertising which is an added value that can be adopted by most of its clients whose main aim to increase their number of customers. Overall, the funding given to Buuteeq is a huge step in the right direction for the soon to be online marketing powerhouse.

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Review of Startup Yokie.. a Twitter Based Search Engine

Search engines have been evolving a lot in the past couple of years. In the start of the decade, searching the web was seen as a rather mundane thing to do. There were various engines, and each simply indexed pages and posted them in a somewhat intuitive way. But then, Google came in and changed everything with its page ranking engine, along with the many other improvements they added, quickly becoming the dominant search engine on the web. But lately, things have started shifting again. The old search style of the early decade no longer holds true, and now a new startup out of Dublin called Yokie is trying to capitalize on this.

When someone searches for a nearby restaurant, or a meal they would like, or even a recommendation for a movie to watch, they no longer rely solely on Google. Instead, social networks are starting to take a major part in people’s lives. It can be a lot more fruitful to ask your friends to get a recommendation, rather than trust the word of strangers on Google, which is now well known to be filled with SEO enhanced pages. This is the concept that brought the creation of Yokie. They call themselves a people-powered search engine. In reality, they rely on Twitter in order to return relevant results to any query you have. Instead of crawling the web for sites, they crawl Twitter for tweets, and give you a current depiction of what the world is thinking.

The startup was founded by Owen Phelan as a school project, and is now hoping to turn it into a business. Going to the site, we can quickly see that Yokie is a different breed of search engines. They clearly expose in a few slides what their engine does, and why someone would want to use it. If you need to learn about something that requires recent results, for example, Twitter will always be more accurate, because people are typing in tweets all the time, whereas Google needs to crawl sites at regular intervals. But does this type of engine work? Google tried something very similar a few months back, integrating Twitter results within their main search page. Due to a conflict with Twitter, they ended the service, but there was no evidence that the real time search was missed. Also, Yokie only relies on Twitter for now, not Facebook or Google Plus, so the results are limited.

There’s no question that social search is a big part of the future web, and Google knows it, since the whole point of starting Google Plus is to try and get a piece of the action. But as for Yokie, right now its purpose is limited. They will have to increase its range to become useful for more than just a couple of targeted niches. If they were to integrate all social networks, along with regular search, and then have a great algorithm to mash everything together in a way that makes sense, then it may just become the holy grail of search engines.